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Site Rules

Like any good home, NortheastFoto must have some house rules to prevent anarchy, and/or the arrest and conviction of the homeowner. Please be advised that these rules can change without notice, and if they do the new rules apply to everything on the site. Unfortunately, someone will test the lines and we'll have to tweak the rules to keep the house a nice place to live.

Intended Atmosphere

Before I get into describing the rules, I should probably describe the intended atmosphere that we'd like to have at NortheastFoto. In that context, the rules should make sense and seem reasonable. NortheastFoto is intended to be a home for help to ALL Northeastern US photographers. For this to work, people need to encourage and support dialog about their photographic interests, without getting to a point of bashing each other's ideas. A friendly rivalry between camera brands is certainly encouraged and should be a lot of fun.

NortheastFoto is a family oriented site. But, you might say that pdaPhones are not owned by kids... that's not what I mean. What I mean is that I want the site to be G or PG rated... not R. There really is no other reason for this other than that's the way the homeowner wants it.

Discussion Forums

Posting - These rules apply to posting entries in any of the forums on NortheastFoto. While we moderate all of the forums, we are not responsible for the individual comments that users may make.

All posts to the forums should be informative and provide information pertinent to the original author's intention for the thread. Try to avoid carrying the conversation off on a tangent. It's better to start a new thread if you have a new topic to discuss. Moderators may sometimes split a thread to accomplish this.

No profanity or abusive conversation is allowed in any of the forums. Users should not engage in bashing another user or putting them down personally.

No dialog about intentionally pirating licensed material is allowed in any of the forums. You may discuss tweaking or modifying programs, but not outright theft of licensed material.

Only registered users may post or reply to any of the forums. Occasionally a forum will be opened without this restriction to try and build the community, but it will generally be discouraged.

You may post links to other sites, provided they are related to the thread. Discussion should accompany external links, rather than just posting link by itself. See the rules for linking below.

Some friendly dialog that is intermingled into a thread is welcome, as long as it doesn't take the thread completely off topic.

Signature - These rules apply to the signature that you create in your user profile. Only the current signature appears in the forums.

No profanity or rude comments allowed.

May contain a link to a single website that you are affiliated with (see Linking rules).

Should be a reasonable length - no more than 3 lines, normal sized fonts.

May not contain any automated display or scripts (like the ones that show a user's IP address, for example).

May not contain any images.

Moderators - The moderators are volunteers that have an interest in helping out with the forums at NortheastFoto. If they ask you to alter something, or alter it for you, they are just following these rules. If you have a dispute with a moderator, you may contact the webmaster for resolution, rather than engaging in an online argument.

User Profiles - Please make sure that the information you include in your profile is accurate. You are not required to fill in all of the fields in the profile, but you are required to be honest about what is included. Email addresses are required to be a registered user. You will be notified if your email address is invalid or unreachable by our system. If a valid email address is not included, we reserve the right to suspend your account. See the Privacy Policy for information about how NortheastFoto uses your email address.

Gallery

NortheastFoto provides a free gallery for use by all registered users of the site. We intend for this to help photographers share their best work and enhance the experience users have visiting the site vs. having to link out to other galleries. Please abide by our desire for a "family friendly" environment when loading images to the gallery.

Please assure that you only upload images to the site that you own the copyright for, or that you have written permission to upload. We believe in photographer's rights to their work, so any images you upload to our gallery remain your intellectual property and you retain all copyright. By using our gallery, you grant Convergent Minds, LLC (the operator of NortheastFoto) a license to use the gallery images for display on the site, and for any related activities such as related promotions, advertising, and contests.

News

Posting - Only members of the NortheastFoto moderator/writer team may post news items. Any registered user may post comments to a news item. It is, however, very easy for our staff to promote a forum post to a news item or article, so feel free to post anything in the forums of that nature and your information may make it to the home page.

Copyright - NortheastFoto will not intentionally use copyright protected material without the permission of the owner. We will post excerpts from other news items on other websites to peak reader interest, then provide a link to the full story at the other site. If a site webmaster does not want NortheastFoto quoting their content, please notify our webmaster and we will ban our news writers from quoting from your site. We will re-use content in our news stories from official press releases.

Editor Review - The NortheastFoto editorial staff reserves the right to publish only those news stories that we believe are beneficial to the visitors of NortheastFoto. We will not publish every press release that is sent to us. Those companies that actively support NortheastFoto through affiliate relationships, promotional give-aways, and other partnership activities will be given preference in our review of news stories.

Advertising

Purpose - We would love to have an advertising free website, but that would probably mean that we would need to charge a fee to access the site. The purpose of the advertising is to fund the site, so that we do not have to charge any fees for its use.

Delivery - We have chosen a very conservative approach to advertising relative to the rest of the web industry. We will only use banner ads on the site, while the pop-up and pop-under ads pay approximately a 5X premium. This choice is based on user feedback and the desire to create a professional site. We do use ad services and it is possible that a rogue ad may be introduced without our knowledge. If you find that the site is serving you pop-up or pop-unders, please send a note to the webmaster with the company that was the sponsor of the ad and we will have it removed from our ad service.

Defeating - While we hope you don't elect to defeat our advertisements, we do believe that it is your choice.

Affiliates - NortheastFoto has a number of affiliate partners. Many of them require that you buy a product directly from the affiliate link to give the partner credit for the commission (some do not give credit for return trips, while others do). If at all possible, please use the affiliate links here when you decide to make online purchases.

Competitive Advertising - You are not allowed to post direct competitive advertising here at NortheastFoto. By this, I mean affiliate links that provide credit to some other organization from traffic at NortheastFoto. ONLY NortheastFoto affiliate links may be used anywhere on the site. You may promote a product, either in the Classifieds forum directly, or as part of a relevant answer to a question or discussion in one of the other forums.

Contests

Our contests are done to help give something back to the user community for supporting the site. We will use a variety of means to pick winners when we give promotional products away. Sometimes it will be random, while others may require you to take some action to win. In all cases, winners are picked in an unbiased manner. Our moderators are volunteers that put in many hours helping to support the site so in most cases they will be allowed to participate in the promotional give aways. The webmaster picks all winners, and if a moderator does participate in the selection, then will be excluded from that contest. We often use random number generators to pick winners.

Hacking

Anyone found attempting to hack into the NortheastFoto server, break into our security system, or defacing the sight in any way will be immediately and permanently banned from the site.

Links

The following rules apply to placing links on NortheastFoto. Because our site is spidered by Google and other search engines, a relationship is created with every site that we link to. For this reason, we must control what links are used on this site.
You may place links in forums, but they must be relevant and be accompanied with dialog (not just a lone link).

No affiliate links may be placed, other than NortheastFoto affiliates.

No links may be placed to sites that promote pornography, hacking, hate dialog, or license pirating.

The percentage of links you post should be very small in comparison to the meaningful dialog that you post.

Friends links are posted as a reciprocal link on the other site. We will periodically audit the links and remove Friends that do not continue to provide a link back to our site. Our friends links are on a frequent rotation on most of our non-forum pages.

Igonoring Rules

We'll assume (in most cases, unless otherwise noted), that if you break one of the rules that it was an oversight on your part. You'll either get a warning from one of the moderators, and/or you might find that your post has been edited by a moderator. Most of our edits are for better formatting, typos, etc, so it doesn't mean that if you find your post has been edited, that you broke a rule. If we find that you either refuse to take the corrective action requested by the moderator, or you continue to ignore the rules, your account may be suspended or deleted. If this happens, you must speak with the webmaster to regain access. Users found re-registering with a different userid (to avoid suspension) will be immediately and permanently banned from the site.

Anything else

If you don't find a rule here and you are looking to see if its okay to do something, then don't do it... if you have to ask, then you probably have your answer. If you do need to ask, direct your questions to the Webmaster.